Have you ever had your game idea stolen?

I have worked on a few hobby projects where I shared the complete game design with the team members. I have posted my ideas on forums and blogs. With all the game designs I have shared, never has any of it been stolen. I even received treats from a angry team member who stole my design documents, said he was going to clone my game and never did.

Games design is just to difficult to be really worth stealing, no matter how good an idea is. Most people would prefer to work on there own bad game idea, than some strangers fantastic game idea.

Don't share unfinished ideas. Investors and supporters could end up thinking your design is bad, when in fact it is just unfinished. Also summarize the idea on your first post, and provide links for people who are interested.

3 hours ago, Corbbin Goldsmith said:

I'm building out a game idea, with nearly every interaction laid out and planned, I will be building it soon, but I need to know what generally tends to happen when you release it too soon. Has anyone ever had their game idea completely stolen? If so, what was your experience?

There is nothing you can do regarding ideas because regardless many people have similar ideas anyway. A lot of my "dream" games are pulled from other people's ideas, and my own mixed in. Don't we all get inspiration from things already done? Trying to "prevent" idea theft is a waste of time and energy. Protecting IP theft is another story.

If by chance someone is making the same game as you and not copying IP, then it's your job to create more value than the other party. It's common to see game developers that are making titles in direct competition with another title.

At the end of the day, an idea that isn't put forth and implemented is worthless. It can cost a lot of money and time to design and create a game with any given concept.

Don't focus on protecting your idea, focus on making a quality product. If someone copies your game, it will force you to adapt to stay in the game or fail. In business there is always competition, and someone else is already working that much harder to make their game the best it can be.

There is also great value in developing openly because you can create a following and interest early on, plus get valuable feedback. Developing in the dark has its cons, such as thinking you have an amazing game but the general player base you're targeting doesn't feel that way, and you won't know until it's too late to make changes.

I've lost count.

4 hours ago, Corbbin Goldsmith said:

I'm building out a game idea, with nearly every interaction laid out and planned, I will be building it soon, but I need to know what generally tends to happen when you release it too soon. Has anyone ever had their game idea completely stolen? If so, what was your experience?

@Scouting Ninja and @Rutin consider this scenario (applies not only with game ideas/designs but across the board) - you are a lonewolf developer or at most a small team of 3 developers. You've spent countless hours researching, burning your brain cells to innovate and come up with original exciting ideas. Cash-strap, you guys are mentally exhausted and just want develop an initial lite, low cost version of your idea and make some initial money to fund your optimised sequels (irrespective of money raised from crowd funding, you guys are still cash-strapped and seriously depleted). Your aim is to become mega big by your 3rd or 4th shipping, at least thats the plan

Then there is this massive and very rich team with >50 developers. Fresh, but devoid of innovative ideas

You chums being so naive remain open with your design and ideas, even your step by step plan of shipping

Anyways this mega team wisely nicks your ideas, up to your future release plans, add some of their cosmetics stuff - with >50 developers and no problems with funds, they have no problems at all making your full optimised ideas in no time.

You guys did all the ground work, they take all the glory as innovators

They render your lite version... even your futuristic shipping obsolete

It was your brilliance that gave birth to the ideas, they reap all the rewards

You guys burnt the mid-night oil, are exhausted and penniless, whille they remain fresh, rich and still counting

Don't say this can never happen, (not just game ideas/designs) if it ideas is really top class innovative, and original, it will worth it for some hawks to nick it. If it doesn't happen to you then they think its not good enough to worth stealing

Moral of the story:: be moderately cautious with your design/ideas. Not saying you should be completely closed. But try to be wise, not stupid. Smart and not naive

3 minutes ago, grumpyOldDude said:

@Scouting Ninja and @Rutin consider this scenario (applies not only with game ideas/designs but across the board) - you are a lonewolf developer or at most a small team of 3 developers. You've spent countless hours researching, burning your brain cells to innovate and come up with original exciting ideas. Cash-strap, you guys are mentally exhausted and just want develop an initial lite, low cost version of your idea and make some initial money to fund your optimised sequels (irrespective of money raised from crowd funding, you guys are still cash-strapped and seriously depleted). Your aim is to become mega big by your 3rd or 4th shipping, at least thats the plan

Then there is this massive and very rich team with >50 developers. Fresh, but devoid of innovative ideas

You chums being so naive remain open with your design and ideas, even your step by step plan of shipping

Anyways this mega team wisely nicks your ideas, up to your future release plans, add some of their cosmetics stuff - with >50 developers and no problems with funds, they have no problems at all making your full optimised ideas in no time.

You guys did all the ground work, they take all the glory as innovators

They render your lite version... even your futuristic shipping obsolete

It was your brilliance that gave birth to the ideas, they reap all the rewards

You guys burnt the mid-night oil, are exhausted and penniless, whille they remain fresh, rich and still counting

Don't say this can never happen, (not just game ideas/designs) if it ideas is really top class innovative, and original, it will worth it for some hawks to nick it. If it doesn't happen to you then they think its not good enough to worth stealing

Moral of the story:: be moderately cautious with your design/ideas. Not saying you should be completely closed. But try to be wise, not stupid. Smart and not naive

I don't believe I made any claim that it couldn't happen, but the opposite... It's impossible to prevent anyone from coming around the bend and picking up your idea. Even if you hide development until the final stage which doesn't make sense from a marketing standpoint, someone can still hire a team and remake your game even better than you did. This is straight business, and the nature of the competitive nature we live in. If someone sees a golden nugget and they're able to take advantage of the situation, they will, wouldn't you if you had money to throw away with a chance to generate a great return? There is a big difference in the mind set of game developers doing this because we love to create games with a hope people will buy it, and big companies ran by shareholders hiring development teams to generate profit. Outside of the game industry this happens regularly in manufacturing, but it doesn't mean everyone should just shut down.

With your logic why should anyone who isn't a 50 man team even bother making games? Someone can just hire a team and out do you, right? Living in a fear based condition looking over your shoulder about what "might" happen is counter productive and not healthy. In any business the small guy can be eaten up because the larger business has more capital to work with, but that doesn't mean it will happen in every case. Some people don't even like dealing with big game publishers because of the lack of community support, pricing policies, pay to win practices, ect...

I own a few business, and one outside of Game Development that is in direct competition with many larger firms that could put me out tomorrow due to capital advantage, but it doesn't happen because my clients prefer the more personalized service. Do you think I wake up each day thinking "Oh my, I better not release my new product or service because that bigger company can just rip it off and out do me." That's called being cooked in the squat.

Time and energy is better spent on making the best product you can, not worrying about the millions of potential negative situations. It has nothing to do with being naive. Your ideas and design will come out one way or another because it's not practical to market your game without showing something.

As I understand it, game ideas are rarely stolen. Can it happen? Absolutely. Has it happened? Again absolutely (or at least, I'm highly certain it has happened at least once). But it doesn't happen often enough to really be concerned by it. Think of it this way: how many unique ideas are generated and shipped/built out by the fairly large amount of game devs/designers in today's Internet connected world? I'd be willing to bet you that 99% of them aren't stolen. As @Scouting Ninja pointed out, it's much easier to simply work on your own idea rather than waste time searching through tons of ideas out there, understand it, then expand it and develop it.

Don't be naive, as in, don't simply give away your IP rights to someone (i.e. sign a contract that literally states that you have no rights to your IP). But at the same time, realize that game design theft is at best a rare occurrence.

Has anyone here ever heard of this happening? I've never heard nor seen it happen. Though my own experience is limited to be fair, since I'm not a proper game dev, so maybe I'm mistaken.

Ideas are fairly easy. Even casual gamers can make a list of game ideas, and experienced designers have notebooks and disk drives full of them. Notably, ideas by themselves aren't legally protected, only the implementations or expressions of the ideas. Since people draw ideas from their experiences there will be a huge overlap with what people make, nearly all of it "stolen" from somewhere. Consider the theory that even though there are millions of books, they are all variations on seven basic plots. In games there are many more ideas, but nearly all are variations and iterations on existing ideas. Completely novel game ideas are quite rare. Whatever your idea, chances are good that someone out in the world has had the same or substantially similar idea.

The hard part -- often costing several million dollars -- is investing all the effort turning the ideas into a polished game. That means implementing all the ideas, with all the tiny little implementation details. Each of those details make ideas and decisions of their own. Even highly similar ideas tend to have big differences due to implementation details.

6 hours ago, grumpyOldDude said:

@Scouting Ninja and @Rutin consider this scenario (applies not only with game ideas/designs but across the board) - you are a lonewolf developer or at most a small team of 3 developers. You've spent countless hours researching, burning your brain cells to innovate and come up with original exciting ideas. Cash-strap, you guys are mentally exhausted and just want develop an initial lite, low cost version of your idea and make some initial money to fund your optimised sequels (irrespective of money raised from crowd funding, you guys are still cash-strapped and seriously depleted). Your aim is to become mega big by your 3rd or 4th shipping, at least thats the plan

Then there is this massive and very rich team with >50 developers. Fresh, but devoid of innovative ideas

You chums being so naive remain open with your design and ideas, even your step by step plan of shipping

Anyways this mega team wisely nicks your ideas, up to your future release plans, add some of their cosmetics stuff - with >50 developers and no problems with funds, they have no problems at all making your full optimised ideas in no time.

You guys did all the ground work, they take all the glory as innovators

They render your lite version... even your futuristic shipping obsolete

It was your brilliance that gave birth to the ideas, they reap all the rewards

You guys burnt the mid-night oil, are exhausted and penniless, whille they remain fresh, rich and still counting

Don't say this can never happen, (not just game ideas/designs) if it ideas is really top class innovative, and original, it will worth it for some hawks to nick it. If it doesn't happen to you then they think its not good enough to worth stealing

Moral of the story:: be moderately cautious with your design/ideas. Not saying you should be completely closed. But try to be wise, not stupid. Smart and not naive

Here's the fundamental flaw in your scenario: you're assuming that the "big, rich developer" actually highly values innovation. In reality, they are going to be conservative and risk-averse, because the simple fact of the matter is that you cannot predict the public's taste, and the market does not reward innovation in general - especially not the market space that large developers operate in. That developer is not going to risk a sizeable sum of money on an unproven idea, and if they want to look for ideas to copy, their going to be looking at their direct competitors, not some ragtag gang of indie devs. If your idea is even of value to them, they'll let your own game function as proof of concept rather than risk their own money.

Your idea is far, far more likely to be "stolen" after you ship and attain some modicum of success, not before.

Also, how many indie devs really have to exhaust themselves racking their brains for game ideas? I personally have more ideas than I can possibly hope to make in my lifetime, and most other devs I know also generate ideas faster than they can complete them, so...

10 hours ago, Anthony Serrano said:

Here's the fundamental flaw in your scenario: you're assuming that the "big, rich developer" actually highly values innovation. In reality, they are going to be conservative and risk-averse, because the simple fact of the matter is that you cannot predict the public's taste, and the market does not reward innovation in general - especially not the market space that large developers operate in. That developer is not going to risk a sizeable sum of money on an unproven idea, and if they want to look for ideas to copy, their going to be looking at their direct competitors, not some ragtag gang of indie devs. If your idea is even of value to them, they'll let your own game function as proof of concept rather than risk their own money.

Your idea is far, far more likely to be "stolen" after you ship and attain some modicum of success, not before.

I have to admit that you are correct .... well with a but......

...there is another way of looking at it. Big companies can take the risk of untested ideas because they can absorb the loses if it fails

There are many examples of this having happened, but just to mention one....

Remember Google Glasses? That was untested, Google took the risk, and it failed spectacularly even before it took off. I don't know how many millions Google spent on R&D for this project, but the fact that they had to bin it did not dent Google's profit a bit. It would have crippled a smaller company. In fact a much smaller company with very limited funds would be stupid to take such a risk, which if it fails, will kill them. Companies that can absorb losses from their other profitable projects are better off taking such risks

16 hours ago, Rutin said:

With your logic why should anyone who isn't a 50 man team even bother making games? Someone can just hire a team and out do you, right? Living in a fear based condition looking over your shoulder about what "might" happen is counter productive and not healthy.

Edit: Mis-read your post earlier today (that always happens when i read from mobile) reading again from my Laptop, i realised I misunderstood you. Yeah i get your point now

12 hours ago, grumpyOldDude said:

you are a lonewolf developer or at most a small team of 3 developers...Anyways this mega team wisely nicks your ideas...

I understand what you are saying, the way the world works this probably happen before.

However from my own experience the ideas where I just posted a incomplete idea, was always received with huge criticism and very little funding. Once the design is revealed the critique diminishes and funding improves.

If you had a idea so great, you could literally go to a bank and take a loan from the bank, knowing that you would earn it all back; then yes, fine keep that a secret.

The main thing for me is that telling me someone is going to steel my idea, is like telling me someone is going to draw the same image I will. It doesn't matter because I do not believe they will draw the exact same thing that I want to.

Yes but I don't care.

Me and another guy came up with modern survival games as a mod for Oblivion way back when. It rolled on up from there, great for them. We didn't do much of anything with it beyond that first half assed mod that, I can't even remember what we did with the mod itself. It's the work beyond that first idea that also counted here, the execution. Just look at Day Z King of the Hill, first modern battle royale multiplayer out there. But the devs didn't put in the work, didn't put in the thousand other ideas that really build upon the first to make it into something great.

So now it's PUBG and Fortnight that are the winners, because they did do that. Don't get me wrong, the first initial idea is important. A lot of people, especially people that "do the work" for a living, vastly underestimate how important that founding idea is. You can put all the hard work you want into an idea but if it's stupid at it's base it's going nowhere. But you also do have to put in the work to get something out. You need both, so even if someone "steals" your idea and succeeds it's not like they didn't do any work themselves.

So trust me when I say all your plans are going to look silly at some point. You're going to get partway into building the game and realize this thing isn't working, so you have to re-arrange this, and change that, and eventually it's a mess and you wonder how anyone ever ships a game at all. That's the work part. Just worry about getting over that part before worrying about how great your initial idea is.

Saying your idea was, or will be stolen borders on paranoia. Having said that, yes, my paranoid lizard brain has found strange resemblances in the published works of others. This, after publicly displaying a prototype, and even after making a direct pitch. I'm not naming names because really, it doesn't matter.

Now, how many ideas have you "stolen"? Did you steal the ideas of others, or did you merely take inspiration from them?

The first thing you (should) learn as a game designer is that ideas cannot be copyrighted, and your ideas will be stolen.

In the above-mentioned incidents, the original "idea" was riffed on, changed, and built upon. I see it as validating my ideas. Even if they weren't actually "stolen", it tells me that the idea I had was marketable.

The concept of our modern game jams comes from the old school jam sessions, where ideas evolved from one person to another. That's how I see it -- we're riffing off each other.

Just reveal what you're comfortable revealing. And after you release, you'll find that there are copycats and clones everywhere.

The thing about the kind of businesses who are likely to rip off ideas and have the resources to do it well, is that they're generally after a quick buck and don't want to take risks.

When a game is complete and gets popular, there's absolutely a risk it will be ripped off - but you can't do anything* to protect it, because they can just buy the game. See for example KetchApp with games like Threes.

Your ideas? They're risky and unproven. The same people mentioned above are extremely unlikely to risk their resources on it.

And then, ideas are a bit nebulous and non-concrete. Give the same idea to five developers and you'll likely get five different games.

Take a read of Why You Should Share Your Game Designs by Daniel Cook.

* You can of course take legal action against rip offs if you have the resources to do so.

49 minutes ago, jbadams said:

The thing about the kind of businesses who are likely to rip off ideas and have the resources to do it well, is that they're generally after a quick buck and don't want to take risks.

When a game is complete and gets popular, there's absolutely a risk it will be ripped off - but you can't do anything* to protect it, because they can just buy the game. See for example KetchApp with games like Threes.

Your ideas? They're risky and unproven. The same people mentioned above are extremely unlikely to risk their resources on it.

And then, ideas are a bit nebulous and non-concrete. Give the same idea to five developers and you'll likely get five different games.

Take a read of Why You Should Share Your Game Designs by Daniel Cook.

* You can of course take legal action against rip offs if you have the resources to do so.

100% agree! This is why I would rather focus on making the best game I can, and take advantage of all the feedback I can get.

I just personally prefer to keep it positive during development because making a game requires so much self discipline and motivation to push through, the last thing you need is toxicity regarding idea theft creeping around.

I've had a few software projects get copied. One of them was a game. I don't really care if someone makes a derivative work from something I made. I hope they do a good job. However, I don't like to lose business. There's really nothing you can do to prevent people from ripping you off with derivative works. I like to take a cue from the business concept of "moat building" though. Make your product so good that anyone who tries to copy you will do an inferior job. If its easy to copy and reproduce, people will do it. If its hard to match, the copy cat will have a steep mountain to climb before they catch up to you. The good thing is that as an original creator, you have an advantage over the copy cats. You have the advantage of time. The clock starts for them when you release your product to the market, but you've got all the time you want until you decide to release. So, make the best product you can before releasing. Consider trade marks and patents where applicable, then defend them.

Quote

Have you ever had your game idea stolen?

Have you ever stolen sand from a beach?

Game ideas are so abundant and completely useless too, they're not worth "stealing". I say useless because they've not been put to the test to see if they even work or not, and even if they have, someone still has to invest 2 years of their life to make it a reality.

No, and in fact I have had a game not stolen once.

When I was around 14 I called LEGO to tell them about my fantastic wonderful game that I had designed, only to be told, "Sorry we can't accept ideas from outside the company."

It sucks not having your ideas stolen.


L. Spiro

3 hours ago, L. Spiro said:

"Sorry we can't accept ideas from outside the company."

This is actually a very common policy in the industry. A company might already be working on a similar idea, or might independently work on one in future; rather than risk being accused of "stealing" someone's submitted idea, it's simpler to have a policy that submitted ideas are discarded unread. It also saves time dealing with the mountain of submissions popular developers would likely receive.

32 minutes ago, jbadams said:

It also saves time dealing with the mountain of submissions popular developers would likely receive.

The rule makes sense, you’re just underestimating how naive I was: I didn’t even call a developer, I just called the LEGO customer-support number listed on the box.


L. Spiro